Quote from: simulacrum on March 25, 2014, 02:07:50 PM

Just curious, where did the name "zibcoin" come from?

I did a search of letters/sounds that meshed well with "bitcoin" and "bit" being vaguely evocative but still different enough to avoid confusion and "zib", "zibcoin", and the 'Ƶ' (Z-with-slash) stuck out of the bunch.

The search started with "tibcoin" - "bitcoin but with a differently-jumbled base unit" - but the sound and abbreviation are a bit too close for clarity in speech and writing. Still, having the internal 'b' was helpfully suggestive. Then, cycled through the alphabet for other leading letters for a "_ib" sound, and 'Z' stuck out as having a minimum number of spelling/meaning/speaking collisions with other English words, being symbolically distinctive and memorable, and offering the available Z-with-slash currency-like unicode character. The com/org domains were also available, so the reasoned case for the terms and examples could be placed in the easiest possible place to find and return to, for boosters to collect symbols/graphics/calculations.

As it turns out, though, alternate derivations can be chosen retroactively. A recursive backronym is one possibility:

"ZIB = ZIB Is Bitcoin" - emphasizing it's just another convenience denomination

Also, ZIB was the name given to a stray dog drafted by the Soviet space program in 1951 for a suborbital test flight. (Apparently ZIB made it back successfully.) Since many cryptocoin enthusiasts like the idea of dog mascots going to the moon, why not honor a common mutt that's been closer to the moon than any purebred?

My fellow promoter of the 'zibcoin' term, klabaki, has also suggested:

Quote from: klabaki on March 19, 2014, 10:20:33 AM

Zibcoin is the short form of zipped microbitcoin, which is a technical term for "compressed microbitcoin", i.e. a shorter version of the word "microbitcoin".

They all work to help cement the term's meaning in different ways...